Letters Literature

Texte intégral lu par Thomas Compère Morel. "La Lettre au père" de Franz Kafka est l'une des œuvres majeures du XXe siècle. L'une des particularités de cette "Lettre au père", écrite en 1919, est que son destinataire n'en eut pas connaissance. La passion que Thomas Compère Morel nourrit pour Franz Kafka et pour sa "Lettre au père" nous a impressionnés. Son rapport fusionnel avec cette œuvre incomparable nous a convaincus qu'il pouvait en faire une lecture qui restitue la force et la beauté du texte.

A disgraced former detective walks into a bar and . . . gets funding for a private investigation agency? If it didn't happen to Jazz Callender, she wouldn't believe it either. All she has to do is partner up with a national security risk known as Lucia Garza, accept one-hundred thousand dollars, and take on assignments that seem to have no purpose. Easy-peasy.

Welcome to the gorgeous Cornish town of St Felix, where there's magic in the air...When Ana inherits a broken-down camper van from her best friend, she takes the chance for a quick trip to Cornwall - some sea air and fish and chips on the beach is just the tonic she needs. But St Felix has bigger plans for Ana. She discovers a series of unsent postcards, dating back to the 1950s, hidden in the upholstery of the van. Ana knows that it's a sign: she'll make sure that the messages reach the person that they were meant for.

I’ve wanted to meet my wolf my entire life. But when I finally do, something else tags along. Something dangerous, hiding in the shadows, hungering for blood. It was sheer luck that I didn’t murder thousands. I don’t know how to control it, and if I can’t defeat it, I can never go home again. To make matters worse, my vampire protector, Aaron, is missing, and there’s a powerful mage trying to capture Fenrir, the only person capable of teaching me how to control my hunger. If he’s caught, I don’t know what I’ll do.

Beth Cardall has a secret. For 18 years, she has had no choice but to keep it to herself, but on Christmas Eve 2008, all that is about to change. For Beth, 1989 was a year marked by tragedy. She had lost any ability to trust, to hope, or to believe in herself. Then, on Christmas Day, as she rushed through a blizzard to the nearest 7-Eleven, Beth encountered Matthew, a strikingly handsome, mysterious stranger, who would single-handedly change the course of her life.

Gaston Gallimard (1881-1975), fondateur des Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue française avec André Gide et Jean Schlumberger, confia un jour à Jean Cau qu'il n'écrirait jamais ses mémoires d'éditeur, craignant de ruiner sa maison en disant tout ce qu'il y avait vu et tout ce qu'il savait des mœurs et pratiques de la vie littéraire. Il ne les écrivit pas et, pour finir, se confia peu. Louable pudeur. Mais les grandes correspondances éditoriales publiées depuis lors sont là qui comblent ce manque.

1938. In the turmoil of pre-war Italy, a painting is stowed in the false bottom of a suitcase, ready to be carried across the border. But as the train draws to a violent halt and armed officers lead the passengers onto the platform, the suitcase is taken and the painting never seen again. 1963. London is on the cusp of change in the swinging 60s. Nightclubs and exclusive parties are in their heyday. But when a lowly boarding-house mistress attempts to take on the establishment, and is accused of spying for the Russians, she can save only one thing - her reputation, or the love of her life.

Though she can't afford the coal to heat her drafty Mayfair mansion, Felicity Langley still clings to her dream of marrying a duke - one she's had since her very first curtsy. After all, she's been promised to the very lofty duke of Hollindrake for the last four years. Now all she has to do is meet him. But what Felicity doesn't realize is that she has met her duke - he's the altogether too handsome man who Felicity has just mistaken...for her new footman!

Kiran Mathur knows firsthand how dangerous love can be. After all, her sister's marriage in India nearly destroyed Kiran's family. So she's decided to redeem romance herself - by not falling for anyone who might disappoint her parents. That is, that was her plan right up until she met her new neighbor, Nash Hawthorne. Nash is a dedicated psychologist and committed to being alone. His family life has taught him the inevitability of abandonment, and he isn't ready to question his beliefs. But spending time with Kiran makes him start to experience emotions he's never felt before.

In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless island in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, where for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the visual artist, Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä, lived, painted, and wrote, energized by the solitude and shifting seascapes. The island's flora, fauna, and weather patterns provided deep inspiration which can be seen reflected in all of Jansson's work, most famously in her novel The Summer Book and her longstanding comic strip and novels for children, Moomin.

As she emerges from the prison of a Puritan New England town, Hester Prynne defies the dark gloom much as the rose blooms against the prison door. With her illegitimate baby, Pearl, clutched in her arms and the letter A - the mark of an adulteress - embroidered in scarlet thread on her breast, Hester holds her head high as she faces the malice and scorn of the townsfolk. Her powerful, bittersweet story is an American classic that continues to touch the hearts of modern readers with its timeless themes of guilt, passion and repentance.

Upon returning to the city of Khelathra-Ven after five years fighting a war in another universe, Captain John Wyndham finds himself looking for somewhere to live, and expediency forces him to take lodgings at 221b Martyrs Walk. His new housemate is Miss Shaharazad Haas, a consulting sorceress of mercurial temperament and dark reputation.

Welcome to the Graveyard of Dead Letters, where evil silent letters, like the W of swords and the K of knives, are buried. Here they can do no harm. But the wicked Spellbinder has plans to revive the letters . . . and use them to create a fierce weapon that will challenge even the powerful Librarian!

On 16 August 1952, Ian Fleming wrote to his wife, Ann, "My love, This is only a tiny letter to try out my new typewriter and to see if it will write golden words since it is made of gold". And he did write golden words: 14 best-selling James Bond books and an equally energetic flow of letters to his wife, publisher, editors, fans, friends and critics, charting 007's progress....

Three women, united by love and kinship, struggle to conform to the social norms of the times in which they live. In 1931 Katherine Henderson leaves behind her small town in Kansas and the marriage proposal of a local boy to live on her own and work at the Sears & Roebuck glove counter in Chicago. There she meets Annie - a bold, outspoken feminist who challenges Katherine's idea of who she thinks she is and what she thinks she wants in life.

Martha Gellhorn was a strong-willed, self-made, modern woman whose journalism, and life, were widely influential at the time and cleared a path for women who came after her. An ardent anti-fascist, she wrote about real people doing real things with intelligence and passion. She is most famous, to her enduring exasperation, as Ernest Hemingway's third wife. Long after their divorce, her short tenure as "Mrs. Hemingway" from 1940 to 1945 invariably eclipsed her writing and, consequently, she never received her full due.

Twelve-year-old Sophie Brown feels like a fish out of water when she and her parents move from Los Angeles to the farm they’ve inherited from a great-uncle. But farm life gets more interesting when a cranky chicken appears and Sophie discovers the hen can move objects with the power of her little chicken brain: jam jars, the latch to her henhouse, the entire henhouse.

This is a meditation on the power of creative connection. Drawing on 20 years' experience as a writer and performer, Kae Tempest explores how and why creativity - however we choose to practise it - can cultivate greater self-awareness and help us establish a deeper relationship to ourselves and the world. Honest, tender and written with piercing clarity, On Connection is a call to arms that speaks to a universal yet intimate truth.

Born in 1875, the great German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke published his first collection of poems in 1898, and went on to become renowned for his delicate depiction of the workings of the human heart. Drawn by some sympathetic note in his poems, young people often wrote to Rilke with their problems and hopes. From 1903 to 1908, Rilke wrote a series of remarkable responses to a young, would-be poet on poetry and on surviving as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. Those letters, still a fresh source of inspiration and insight, are accompanied here by a chronicle of Rilke's life.

Centered on recently discovered, authenticated correspondence between two famous 19th-century Masonic leaders, Confederate General Albert Pike and British Colonel James Wilson Bury MacLeod Moore, this modern-day thriller follows Thomas, a direct descendant of Col. Moore, and Janet Rose, a direct descendant of the Merovingian Kings and House of David, as they risk their lives to protect the letters and the Templar and Rosicrucian secrets encoded within them.